9 Mar
2007
9 Mar
'07
10 a.m.
The point is in the old days the distribution was source code that would be
submitted by an author and approved for publication by the group moderator.
That's a lot better than unverified attachments -- especially binaries.
As for the ./configure -- at least you could go through the source code and
see what it was doing.
Bill
On 3/9/07, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:
In article <ee5521f80703090937j66401c1ese7320c4775d26458 at mail.gmail.com>,
"Bill Pechter" <pechter at gmail.com> writes:
In the old days... with rn or perl etc... the
stuff was posted via the
Usenet and through comp.sources.unix -- so I knew it had lots of eyes
checking it, uudecoding it and building it.
I don't see it so different now; there are places you trust and places
you don't. You're just saying in the old days you could trust
newsgroup distributions.
Its always been this way. On PCs there have always been lots of "free
utilities" (even before "PC" meant IBM PC or compatible) for which you
never had source. Some of them were carrying virus payloads. A
copyparty could be a dangerous thing and it might not have even been
intentional by the person who transmitted the virus to you.
Commercial software has even gone out with virus infections on it.
As I say, at some point you have to establish some trust in other
people's software. How you do it is up to you.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>